“She has a daughter,” Walters said. “She was 7 at the time, and she just turned 13 on Oct. 31 without her mom.”

Lisa Kreutzer was taking a friend back to his car, heading home from watching the crosstown shootout at a Newport bar with friends.

Firefighter Joseph Dance got on Interstate 71 going the wrong direction. He had been drinking.

“They had about two to three seconds from the time she saw him so she didn’t have a chance,” Walters said.

Walters said all Dance had to do to prevent the collision was call a cab; all his friends had to do was recognize he was too drunk to drive.

In the past three Thanksgiving holiday weekends, Ohio State Patrol officers arrested more than 1,300 people suspected of drinking and driving. During those same time periods, 20 fatal crashes were operating a vehicle while intoxicated related.

“Who’s going to be the one that’s not going to call somebody who’s going to get behind a wheel and devastate a family like we’ve been devastated?” Walters asked.

Dance did not want to comment on camera out of respect for the family. However, he said in an email that hurting someone was the furthest thing from his mind that night.

“I wish I would have had a sober, designated driver,” he wrote. “I wish I would have called a cab. I wish I would have called for a ride. I wish I wouldn’t have had so much to drink. I wish I could change places with Lisa. As easy as it was to find myself in that awful position, it would have been just as easy to keep myself out of it.”